That output shows that all 16 gigs of ram are used,
not just 4 as you said. 12 gigs are file cache so
you must be working with a lot of data or very large
files. But anyway... if you're running out of ram
AND swap, you can increase your swap to avoid that
problem, just add more drives or swap partitions.
Increasing your swap will not solve your problem
with kswapd taking lots of cpu time though, or the
fact that you had to hit swap in the first place.
Your 8450 server can handle up to 32 gigs of memory,
I'd just put more in it and that should solve your
problem. Memory is very cheap right now if you don't
buy it from Dell, here's a link to crucial.com for
high-quality Micron memory with a lifetime warranty.
This link is for 1 GB chips that will work in your
8450, they cost $243/each and you have to add them
in pairs.
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.asp?imodule=CT128M72S4R8E
Good luck, that's quite a server you have there,
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: Vsevolod Ilyushchenko [mailto:simonf at cshl.org]
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 11:07 AM
To: linux-poweredge at dell.com
Subject: Swap with 16 Gb of RAM
Hi,
I have a Dell 8450 with 16 Gb of RAM used for running biological
computations. Currently I have 3.5 Gb of swap, and sometimes it is almost
completely used up even when only 4 Gb of RAM is used. Worse of all,
sometimes kswapd takes up a lot of CPU time. Here is a recent free output:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 16490952 16486332 4620 0 420 12197416
-/+ buffers/cache: 4288496 12202456
Swap: 3578664 2915448 663216
I am trying to understand what is going on, but I do not know much about
swap usage or how to debug it. I do not even know about the proper
newsgroup/mailing list to ask this question, except the linux-kernel list.
(I am not sure whether I should go that far. :)
Thanks in advance for any ideas,
Simon
--
_________
| x | Simon (Vsevolod ILyushchenko) simonf at cshl.org| y = e |
|_________| http://www.simonf.comsimonf at simonf.com
Disclaimer: This is not me.
This is just my mailer talking to your mailer...
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